APRIL 18, 1906, will long be remembered as the day when a long list of calamities, by earthquake and fire, occurred in various localities of Central California. These all took place simultaneously, the cause being an instantaneous shock, without a moment's warning, and lasting but twenty-eight seconds. Not less than five hundred, perhaps a thousand, human lives were sacrificed, and the financial loss was hundreds of millions of dollars.
And yet those twenty-eight seconds, to all within the limits of the great earthquake, were long enough and weighty enough to indelibly impress themselves upon the memory of all conscious life to come.
Oftimes in this life of probation the decisions, or actions, of a few seconds are fraught with eternal consequences of weal and wo. It took mother Eve but a brief moment to believe the tempter's lie and disobey God. Then, shortly after, it required but a short interview for her to persuade her husband to do the same thing; and what human mind ever can measure or comprehend the awful consequences. Even the direful disaster of April 18, 1906, together with all like disasters that have ever occurred in the past, or will ever take place in the future, in this world, are the results of that first brief act of disobedience. And these have been supplemented and augmented by subsequent, all hasty and unwise decisions and actions.
There is a right way, and a wrong way. In the right way we are always safe, no matter what may come. "All things work together for good to them that love God," even in this state of mixed good and evil; and the day is coming fast when we shall be forever beyond all accidents, mishaps, or misfortunes—in a home where all will be bliss and always bliss. But in the wrong way we are never safe, and if those who walk it should escape many misfortunes here, there is a hurt that is sure to come to them some day, and that is "the second death." And the consequences of such a hurt will be fearful, fatal, and forever. "He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death." Rev. 2:11.